{"id":14489,"date":"2013-02-25T14:08:19","date_gmt":"2013-02-25T14:08:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wonderlandmagazine.com\/?p=14489"},"modified":"2013-04-12T08:46:57","modified_gmt":"2013-04-12T08:46:57","slug":"willa-holland-interview","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.wonderlandmagazine.com\/2013\/02\/25\/willa-holland-interview\/","title":{"rendered":"WILLA HOLLAND: Interview"},"content":{"rendered":"
Willa Holland, star of CW’s Arrow<\/a> and ex-O.C<\/a> bad girl, tells us about singing for Spike Jonze<\/a> and skating in San Diego. Read the magazine feature here.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n “I’m quite embarrassed to tell you this and have you write it in an article and have people look at it,” Willa Holland is telling me over the phone from Vancouver, laughing and talking in a rush like we\u2019re in the back row at school. Her secret? She sings and plays ukulele on the soundtrack to the new Spike Jonze skateboarding film, Pretty Sweet<\/a>. “It\u2019s seriously such a rough edit; it’s insane. I couldn\u2019t believe he put it on iTunes. I was like, ‘Are you kidding? Oh my god!’ My voice sounds so bad.”<\/p>\n This isn\u2019t exactly the confession I was expecting from a polished starlet who’s been acting and modeling for high-end brands since the age of seven, encouraged by family friend Steven Spielberg and introduced to agencies by her stepdad Brian de Palma, who directed Scarface and Mission: Impossible. Holland’s made her name playing a string of troublemaking teens \u2013 she wreaked havoc on The O.C.<\/a> for two seasons as Marissa Cooper’s little sister Kaitlin \u2013 and now she\u2019s playing another angsty party girl on Arrow<\/a>, the CW series based on DC comic book Green Arrow<\/a>. But, despite being sick with food poisoning (she’ll never send out for Chinese food on set again, she vows), she’s as sunny and thoughtful as her best-known characters are sulky and reckless.<\/p>\n “I do get called an old soul a lot,” she says. “I think that living in Hollywood my whole life has helped hone that. I\u2019ve dealt with a lot in my 21 years.” Born to an actress and a cinematographer, she grew up on movie sets, and while she was excited about working in the business as a kid, she also says that she “wasn’t really aware what i was getting myself into”. At 14, when she became part of The O.C.\u2019s ensemble, she could relate closely to her rule-breaking, attention-seeking character. \u201cI think I was right there in that stage of life where Kaitlin was,” she admits. “It was very obvious to me why I got cast in that role at that time.”<\/p>\n During breaks from The O.C. she worked on other jobs, “so it’s not like I really had a summer,” and when the show finished a couple of years later her gruelling schedule continued. she flew straight to Italy to play Colin Firth’s daughter in the michael Winterbottom film Genova<\/a>, and then bounced around London, Sweden, Louisiana and Mexico making films of varying quality and success with the likes of Susan Sarandon, Paul Bettany and Ray Liotta. more recently, she had a recurring part on Gossip Girl<\/a> as a bratty model and played the lead in a film adaption of the Judy Blume novel Tiger Eyes. “I was literally non-stop for three or four years from about [the age of] 14 to about 18, 19,” she says, “and then right before I turned 20 I was like, ‘I need a break.'”<\/p>\n She took a year’s sabbatical “to figure some things out” and try her hand at some new hobbies. “I spent a lot of time putting myself back into being a kid again. I [had been] forcing myself to grow up a lot.” Every weekend, she\u2019d drive to San Diego, where a gang of her high-school friends <\/p>\n were living, and “we would go skate every day, I’d take photos every day, we’d play music all night, and barbecue, be together, have good times, and it was just awesome. There was no care in the world for a little while.”<\/p>\n ‘Pretty Sweet Song’ came out of this period, and it\u2019s a lot better than she\u2019s making out. She speak-sings lines such as “I used to think my troubles were life-long” and “it\u2019s a bitter life but pretty sweet” in a world-weary sigh that evokes hazy, hungover afternoons in LA. (She asks me to mention that the “Euro-pop kind of vibe” the Italian producers added to the track wasn\u2019t her idea, though.) Since then, she\u2019s been working on some covers and original songs that she\u2019s planning to put on Soundcloud, and, while Twitter and Facebook \u201cscare the hell\u201d out of her, she has also been sharing some of her photography on Instagram<\/a>, posting dramatic skyscapes and snapshots of friends.<\/p>\n